The original cast album of Adam Guettel’s Broadway musical Days of Wine and Roses, with a book by Craig Lucas, starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James, is out digitally today; the CD is due in the spring. This searing musical is based on the 1962 film and original 1958 teleplay of the same name, about a couple falling in love in 1950s New York and struggling against themselves to build their family. Days of Wine and Roses marks the reunion of Guettel and Lucas, who last collaborated on the six-time Tony Award–winning musical The Light in the Piazza. “Repeated listenings compound the amazement,” the New York Times says of Guettel’s work, which “has always offered that kind of challenge—initially leaving a feeling of: Beautiful, but wait, I need to hear it again—and those up for it have a way of coming away shining like Moses down from the Mount. The new score has the same effect.”

Portuguese singer and songwriter Carminho has released “O quarto (fado Menor),” the full version of the song she performs live in a scene with Emma Stone in Poor Things, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos. The scene depicts Carminho singing the fado and playing the Portuguese guitar to a mesmerized Bella Baxter, Stone’s character in the film, which also stars Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo and has been nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards. You can watch the video for the track here.

The Staves’ new album, All Now, produced by John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), is due March 22, marking their debut album as the duo of Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor, after their sister Emily’s departure. “There was a delayed reaction to trauma and these big changes out of your control,” Jess says of the period after the February 2021 release of their album Good Woman, as the band—like everyone—was forced to sit with their thoughts. Struggling after two years of deep solitude and pain, The Staves did what they know how to do best: they got back to writing with the idea of going back to basics and focusing almost solely on each other and their guitars as a starting point.

Grammy and Academy Award winner Gustavo Santaolalla—who this week received the Latin Grammy Trustees Award—releases his acclaimed 1998 album Ronroco on vinyl for the first time in a newly remastered edition from Nonesuch on January 26, 2024. The singer, composer, and producer’s classic album—which takes its name from a South American stringed instrument—comprises twelve original tunes inspired by traditional Argentinean music and influenced by music of Japan, Africa, and Eastern Europe. “Ronroco conjures bucolic images and feelings for me,” filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu writes in the new liner note. “There’s always a note that surprises, breaks the pattern of the rainstorm, turning into silence, a gentle drizzle, or escalating into a tempest.”

Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra)'s new album, The Past Is Still Alive, is due February 23 on Nonesuch. Segarra created the album during a period of personal grief, when they found inspiration in radical poetry, railroad culture, outsider art, the work of writer Eileen Myles, and activist groups like ACT UP and Gran Fury. They use their lyrics as a way to immortalize and say goodbye to those they have loved and lost, and to honor both the heartbroken and the hopeful parts of themselves. Though made in North Carolina by the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based Segarra and produced by Brad Cook, the record brings listeners to places far beyond, evoking vivid experiences of small shops and buffalo stampedes in Santa Fe, childhood road trips and Florida storms, struggles of addiction in the Lower East Side, and days-long journeys to outrun the cops in Nebraska. Hurray for the Riff Raff will lead a headline tour of the US and Europe from February through May.

Kronos Quartet’s acclaimed 1995 album Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass is now available on vinyl for the first time, to coincide with Kronos: Five Decades, a year-long celebration of the quartet’s 50th anniversary. The two-LP set, produced by the composer, Judith Sherman, and Kurt Munkacsi, features violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud performing quartets No. 2 (Company) (1983), No. 3 (Mishima) (1985), No. 4 (Buczak) (1990), and No. 5 (1991), the first piece Glass wrote for Kronos. “It contains some of Glass's best music since Koyaanisqatsi,” said the New York Times. “His ear for sumptuous string sonorities is undeniable.” The Washington Post called it “an ideal combination of composer and performers.”

Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson's new album, Cloudward, is due January 19. The album features eight new compositions by Halvorson she performs with her sextet Amaryllis—the improvisatory band that performed on her acclaimed 2022 albums Amaryllis and Belladonna: Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass), Tomas Fujiwara (drums), Jacob Garchik (trombone), and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). Laurie Anderson is featured on one track. "All the music on Cloudward was written in 2022 … when things started moving forward," Halvorson says. "Air travel had resumed, and we were once again cloudward … This band, for me, was quite simply working, both musically and personally, and the main thing I felt while writing the music was optimism."

Kronos Quartet’s award-winning 1990 album Black Angels will be released on vinyl on February 16, 2024, to coincide with Kronos Quartet: Five Decades, a year-long celebration of the quartet’s 50th anniversary. First released in 1990, the album features George Crumb’s title piece, which inspired David Harrington to found the quartet in 1973, and works by Charles Ives, István Márta, Thomas Tallis, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The fourth side of the vinyl is an etching of an illustration created especially for this purpose by Matt Mahurin, whose work is featured on the original album cover. The Evening Standard included Black Angels among its “100 Definitive Classical Albums of the 20th Century.”

"This is my reaction to being assaulted by information," composer and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire says of his Nonesuch debut album, Owl Song, due December 15, featuring a trio with two musicians he has long admired, guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley. "This record is me wanting to create a safe space. Part of the challenge was: Can I create something that's oriented around open space, the way some of the records I love the most do?" You can hear "Owl Song 1" here now. The New York Times says: "Akinmusire has been making some of the most intimate, spellbinding music of his career." Pitchfork has called his work "music that seeks peace not just despite a world of unrest, but within it."

“‘Dawning’ has multiple meanings for me,” composer/guitarist Yasmin Williams says of her first song on Nonesuch, out today, which features Aoife O’Donovan on vocals, Kafari on rhythm bones, and Nic Gareiss’ percussive dancing and provides an early peek at her new album, which the label will release in early 2024: “the dawning of my professional music career and a new love in my personal life, the dawning sky that appeared when I first started writing this song, and me smiling to myself with dawning recognition that I get to create music that I love for a living and share it with the world. This song represents a major shift in how I approach my music and expands the possibilities of what my songs can be.”

Vagabon, aka Lætitia Tamko, has released her new album, Sorry I Haven’t Called, out now. On the album, Tamko reinvents herself once again with the most playful and adventurous music of her career. Co-produced by Tamko and Rostam (Vampire Weekend, Haim), the album features twelve vibrant tracks she wrote and produced primarily in Germany that channel dance music and effervescent pop through her own confident sensibilities. “This record feels like what I've been working towards,” Tamko says. “It's completely euphoric.”

The Staves release “You Held It All,” their first new music since the release of their 2021 album, Good Woman, today. It is also the group’s first recording as the duo of Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor, following their sister and bandmate Emily’s stepping back after the birth of her children. Produced by John Congleton in Los Angeles, “‘You Held It All’ is a song about understanding, and the knots we tie ourselves in when we don’t express our truth,” The Staves say, “and how much power and freedom there can be when we do.”